PolicyNews
The New York Times sues Brave over AI scraping
The New York Times and three other papers have sued Brave Software. They say Brave passed their scraped articles on to AI companies and that its browser helps users get around paywalls.
By: Mikola Máté Patrik · · 2 min read
Mikola Máté Patrik
What happened?
The New York Times, and in a separate complaint the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, have sued Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser (The Verge). They allege Brave scraped their sites without permission, passed the content on to AI companies, and that its browser helps users bypass their paywalls.
What are the claims?
According to the complaint, Brave monetized its index of scraped websites by selling AI companies paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index." Those companies used it to train models, to answer user queries, or both. The plaintiffs name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers.
The second claim targets the browser's Paywall blocker, which Brave promotes for hundreds of top publishers. The plaintiffs say Brave never asked for permission, never paid, and took steps that keep publishers from blocking it. A New York Times spokesperson said the paper had repeatedly asked Brave to stop.
What the companies say
Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, SpaceXSI and Cohere did not immediately respond to The Verge. Perplexity's chief communications officer said the Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists, calling the suit disinformation.
Why it matters
Until now, publishers have mostly sued model developers. This case targets the layer in between: the search index AI products pull live web content from. If the plaintiffs win, companies that build web search into AI products will have to look harder at the legal footing of their data sources.
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